Kevin Fu and Fuhao Shi remember one of the first videos that made them realize the power of Pixel 8 Pro’s Video Boost technology. “I filmed a demo video early on when we were working on Video Boost,” Fuhao says. “It was super dark; you couldn’t make out any detail.” Then, they applied Video Boost, a camera feature on Pixel 8 Pro that makes videos higher quality with better lighting, finer details and richer colors. Suddenly they could see a red car parked on the street, homes in the background and details of the road — all previously obscured in the dark. “It was one of those ‘wow!’ moments,” Kevin says.
Kevin and Fuhao are part of the team that has brought Video Boost to life; Kevin is a product manager and Fuhao is a senior software engineer, both for Pixel Camera. “We want to give people the best video quality possible,” Kevin says.
To do this, the team developed a feature that relies on multiple technologies to improve video quality. For better lighting, Video Boost uses HDR+ with Night Sight (a process that pulls in a large range of dark to bright lighting data). Video Boost also uses machine learning techniques that stabilize each frame and reduce motion blur so the end result is ultra sharp.
To use Video Boost, you simply select the option from your camera settings and record your video. Right after you record the video, you will have an initial video that is immediately available on your Pixel. Your phone will also send a second temporary video to the cloud for processing (boosting). You’ll get a message once your boosted video is ready.
All of this is possible thanks to what Kevin and Fuhao describe as the powerful duo of cloud computing and on-device processing, powered by the Pixel 8 Pro’s Tensor G3 chip. “That’s the beauty of what we can do here,” Kevin says. “The process starts on the device, and then transfers to the cloud — and that’s where we can do a lot of optimizations that we couldn’t do on the device alone.”
Below, Kevin and Fuhao share more about how Video Boost works as well as these four tips for using it.
1. Don’t be afraid to shoot in dark, dim settings
Shooting videos at night or in other dark settings on your phone can be tough because of hardware and software limitations. “Smartphone camera sensors are generally smaller compared to traditional DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, so it’s hard for them to capture enough light. And from a computational perspective, it becomes difficult to run the best algorithms to upgrade the video quality,” Kevin says. “It’s easier with photos because that’s just one image to produce, but videos are typically shooting in 30 frames per second, so there are a lot of images for the algorithms to process.” This is why, oftentimes, videos shot by phones in dim settings are grainy, dark, blurry or all of the above.
Video Boost, however, delivers incredibly well-lit, bright, crisp videos — thanks to the aforementioned tech as well as its new sensor. “In low light, the visual noise levels are much better,” Fuhao says. It can even result in a big reveal: “A lot of people will record something in a dark area and they won’t really be able to even see anything they shot,” Kevin says. “Then they use Video Boost on it and when they get the results, they’re so excited when suddenly so much more is visible.”
